Freddie Roach Names the 5 Best Boxers in Mixed Martial Arts

Freddie Roach is a legend of the boxing game. He’s revered as a trainer of champions and has a brilliant mind for the sport.So when Roach names his five best boxers in mixed martial arts on Inside MMA, you know we’re going to pay attention.Here’s Roach…

Freddie Roach is a legend of the boxing game. He’s revered as a trainer of champions and has a brilliant mind for the sport.

So when Roach names his five best boxers in mixed martial arts on Inside MMA, you know we’re going to pay attention.

Here’s Roach’s list:

5. K.J. Noons
4. Nick Diaz
3. B.J. Penn
2. Georges St-Pierre
1. Anderson Silva

Roach has worked with four of the names on this list, so it’s no surprise they are included.

I respect Roach’s opinion on boxing, obviously, but he’s missing a few names on this list.

At least in terms of lightweights, Frankie Edgar is a much better boxer than Noons. Granted, Noons does have a pro boxing record, but he never really faced anyone of any value. I’d go as far as to say Noons wasn’t even considered a decent boxing prospect. He’s constantly vaunted as one of the best boxers in MMA, but I just don’t see it. Edgar is quicker, much more technical and strings together better combinations.

Junior dos Santos also deserves to be on this list. He has some of the best boxing in the world, not just in the heavyweight division, but in the entire sport. He’s a better boxer than St-Pierre for sure.

I can’t argue with Silva, Penn or Diaz being on this list. All three are excellent technical boxers, at least when it comes to translating the skill to MMA.

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Muhammed Lawal’s Strikeforce Release Shows Need for Comprehensive Twitter Policy

By all accounts, Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal had a pretty rough Tuesday.Lawal was first fined $39,000 and suspended for nine months by the Nevada State Athletic Commission during a hearing just a stone’s throw from the old Las Vegas Strip. This was a kick…

By all accounts, Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal had a pretty rough Tuesday.

Lawal was first fined $39,000 and suspended for nine months by the Nevada State Athletic Commission during a hearing just a stone’s throw from the old Las Vegas Strip. This was a kick in the pants for a guy who, by his own admission, has had more than 16 knee surgeries (with over $100,000 in medical bills) to treat the lingering staph infection that almost took his leg and his life. 

During the commission meeting, Lawal was asked by commissioner Pat Lundvall if he “speaks or writes English.” Keep in mind that this question, innocent or not, came nearly seven minutes into the commission meeting, so Lundvall was well aware that Lawal spoke English.

In all likelihood, Lundvall was simply trying to establish, for the record, that Lawal understood English. This is common practice in hearings like this one. But you also cannot fault Lawal for receiving the comments with a hint of racism.

Look, Pat Lundvall is not a racist. Is she a terrifying woman, akin to the scariest teacher you ever had during your middle school years? Yes. I’ve been to plenty of NSAC meetings, and Lundvall always managed to scare me just by showing up. She can be rude and condescending, but she’s not a racist.

So yes, I can understand why Mo lashed out the way he did.

I’m not sure why he was released from Strikeforce, however. These incidents involving Twitter never seem to have much of a center mass. Forrest Griffin made rape jokes, but a simple explanation allowed him to keep his job. Miguel Torres? Not so much.

Dana White himself regularly calls people much worse names than the one Lawal called Lundvall. 

Is it because Lundvall is a public official? If that’s the case, shouldn’t the same grace extend to Steve Mazzagatti?

A lot of this can be solved with a comprehensive Twitter policy. As of right now, there are no concrete rules as to what you can and cannot say on Twitter. UFC officials urge fighters to “use common sense” during meetings at the annual Fighter Summit in Las Vegas, but it’s becoming quite apparent that “using common sense” isn’t going to be a great rule of thumb going forward.

It’s quite easy to avoid stepping over the line when you know your job is in jeopardy if you do so. It becomes immensely difficult to avoid that line when it’s a nebulous, moving object. 

The UFC is a very smart company, and they are privately owned. They are allowed to hire and fire whomever they want, whenever they want and for whatever reason they want. If they believed King Mo crossed a line yesterday in directing his wrath at Lundvall, fine. That’s their prerogative. 

But it’s past time to make this thing easier on the fighters. If you’re going to encourage off-center Twitter behavior with financial rewards, you need to lay down some very specific ground rules governing what they can and cannot say. 

That way, when you bring down the hammer for dumb social media comments, you’ll at least have a reason.

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King Mo and the 5 Twitter Controversies That Rocked Zuffa

Twitter can be a beautiful thing. Where else can you reach out to your favorite athletes and entertainers—and have them reach right back?But Twitter is also a dangerous game. It’s great for marketing and outreach, but can backfire badly when keep…

Twitter can be a beautiful thing. Where else can you reach out to your favorite athletes and entertainers—and have them reach right back?

But Twitter is also a dangerous game. It’s great for marketing and outreach, but can backfire badly when keeping it real goes wrong.

Of course, cage fighters are potentially volatile individuals. Sometimes that passion gets the better of them. These are five of those times.

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Dana White Is Right in Keeping Fedor Emelianenko out of the UFC

Fedor Emelianenko isn’t the fighter he once was. That’s a safe assumption at this point.Gone are the days when Emelianenko, a skinny fat guy if there ever was one, dominated the heavyweight ranks with an unreal combination of power and speed that few i…

Fedor Emelianenko isn’t the fighter he once was. That’s a safe assumption at this point.

Gone are the days when Emelianenko, a skinny fat guy if there ever was one, dominated the heavyweight ranks with an unreal combination of power and speed that few in the sport have ever been able to match, regardless of weight class.

Fedor, as we so lovingly call him, halted a three-fight losing streak with a pair of wins over Jeff Monson and Satoshii Ishii in November and December last year. The Russian recently said that we may ultimately see him fight inside the Octagon, but according to UFC president Dana White, that’s not the case.

“Not even a little bit,” told MMAJunkie.com. “That was a guy who was made an incredible offer, and they laughed at it. They aren’t laughing now.”

While I love the idea of finally seeing Emelianenko in a UFC cage after all these years, there’s really no point. The guy is a washed-up fighter. That’s not to say he was never any good, because he was quite obviously the pound-for-pound best fighter on the planet during his PRIDE heyday.

But these are no longer those days. Age and time catches up with every fighter. For some, it happens early, when a combination of training wear and tear and a life lived in nightclubs causes your skills to deteriorate before you’re ready. For others, like Randy Couture, life truly only begins in your 40s. 

Emelianenko is not Randy Couture. He’ll never beat the likes of Junior dos Santos, Alistair Overeem or Cain Velasquez, and—as my good friend E. Casey Leydon pointed out to me—his price tag is too high.

Five years ago, we’d be singing a different tune. But this is not five years ago. 

I’d like to remember Fedor as he once was, and not what he’s become over the past two or so years. If that means I never get to see him fight in the Octagon, I’m okay with that. 

You should be, too.

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King Mo Lawal’s Fine Proves That Tainted Supplement Defense Isn’t Going to Work

The fine handed down by the Nevada State Athletic Commission today to Strikeforce light heavyweight Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal just about puts a nail in the coffin of the “tainted supplement” defense.Lawal was forced to give back his $15,000 win bonus an…

The fine handed down by the Nevada State Athletic Commission today to Strikeforce light heavyweight Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal just about puts a nail in the coffin of the “tainted supplement” defense.

Lawal was forced to give back his $15,000 win bonus and fined 30 percent of the purse he earned in beating Lorenz Larkin back at a Strikeforce event in January. All told, Lawal has to write a check for $39,000 on top a nine-month suspension also levied by the commission.

That’s a heavy price to pay for a fighter who has undergone an impossible series of staph infections and surgeries in recent months. Lawal has medical bills piling up. His manager has noted that Lawal’s medical costs have totaled over $100,000, and that’s not including his latest setback in recent weeks.

Let me point out one thing. I believe Lawal when he says he’s innocent. I typically don’t buy into the tainted supplement defense because it seems like an easy way out. But in Lawal’s case, I believe he’s telling the truth when he had no idea that a supplement he was taking included steroids. He’s proven over the course of a very long career in wrestling and MMA that he doesn’t need performance-enhancing drugs to help his game. Not in the slightest.

Lawal has taken, and passed with flying colors, numerous Olympic-level WADA drug tests. Those tests were far more strict than any he’s had to undergo since making the transition to mixed martial arts. To think that Lawal would suddenly decide that he needed synthetic help—especially against a fighter like Lorenz Larkin—is laughable and downright ludicrous at best.

But the decision handed down by the NSAC proves that commissioners just aren’t going to buy the tainted supplement defense, no matter how much credibility the fighter in question may have. 

Cris Cyborg, the former Strikeforce women’s featherweight champion who tested positive for stanozolol in December, is using the same defense.

“People say the only way I have gotten to where I am now is the use of drugs,” she said. “They say I am a cheater. That’s not true. I just made the mistake of taking something that was supposed to help me lose weight. I did not know it was a steroid.”

Fighters have to be responsible for what they put into their bodies. If there’s a remote chance that something you’re taking could cause you to test positive for steroids, you simply don’t take them. The performance gains you may receive from supplements don’t and could never outweigh the costs of a lengthy suspension and fine.

Just ask King Mo. He found out the hard way.

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10 Biggest ‘What Ifs’ in UFC History

What If? It was always one of my favorite comic books. As a reader, you knew that in a What If? book, anything goes. Characters you know and love could die. A hero could secretly be a villain. The world, in short, could turn topsy-turvy—with…

What If? It was always one of my favorite comic books. As a reader, you knew that in a What If? book, anything goes. Characters you know and love could die. A hero could secretly be a villain. The world, in short, could turn topsy-turvy—with no long-term consequences—in the blink of an eye.

In the spirit of the Mighty Marvel Marching Society, I’d like to play my own little game of “What if?” Let’s mine the depths of the UFC’s history and look for turning points that might have altered the sport as we know it, starting with UFC 1.

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